Measured against Atlanta, of course, much of the rest of Georgia looks poor and rural by comparison. Not so long ago, however, Atlanta itself was just another layover spot on the way to somewhere else. Now it has reached what economists call the self-sustaining level, where growth only leads to more growth.
How can that be? Go ask Randy Perkinson. Perkinson, 33, co-founder and president of Compack Inc., an Atlanta-based packaging-design firm, started his company in 1980 with 4 employees and 500 square feet of work space. Today, he employs 52 people, occupies 18,000 square feet, and serves such major firms as Coca-Cola, Georgia Pacific, and Kimberly-Clark. Atlanta, says Perkinson, is "young enough that opportunities already taken in other cities are still here.
"If I wanted to get out of this business and into another one," he adds, "I'd go to a city slightly further along that Atlanta, see what they've got that we don't have yet, and then come back and do it here, because our growth notential seems about limitless."
NEW HAMPSHIRE: PROSPERITY BY PROXIMITY
Every four years the Presidential primary parade rolls through New Hampshire like some wayward circus train, inspiring dozens of national news features about this quaint little state somewhere to the north of Boston that turns farmers into political forecasters and political nobodies into front-runners. Often these stories create the impression that New Hampshire residents don't do much between campaigns except make George McGovern buttons and shovel snow. Not so. Truth is, this little nobody of a state (population just now reaching 1 million) is a legitimate front-runner in the national campaign to generate jobs and create growth companies. And it isn't just because Rather, Brokaw, Jennings, et al. book up all the hotel suites six months in advance.
"If you want to look at the macro issues for New Hampshire," says Rick Barber, president of Satter Cos. of New England, a real estate development firm in Lincoln, N.H., "start with the overall strength of the New England economy, because that's really the prime for our pump. Boston is one of the most vigorously growing cities in the country, and New Hampshire is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on conditions like taxes and housing that can make that city unappealing to start a company in."
Barber, former director of economic development under governors Hugh Gallen and John Sununu, has worked both sides of the public-policy fence. He believes that what states try to do in the way of generating growth doesn't amount to a hill of beans compared with larger economic forces at work in the region. This is a fairly common opinion in New Hampshire, where, as one Concord state official puts it, "We allow the entrepreneur to succeed, or fail, fairly easily here, and we do that three ways: by minimizing the downside risks, by letting him keep more of his income, and by not plowing taxpayer dollars into private ventures." To Barber's mind, the user-friendly scale of doing business in New Hampshire is of inestimably more value to a growth economy than any single state initiative.
"State venture capital pools are great," says Barber, "but most entrepreneurs would rather be able to take a regulatory issue to the statehouse and be confident they can work something out. I do business in both Vermont and New Hampshire -- both small, rural New England states. The difference in their attitudes, however, is like night and day." On the chart, the difference between these otherwise similar states is 17 places.
The third macro issue, Barber adds, is a $1.5-billion annual tourist trade, a boon helped, no doubt, by the state's quadrennial exposure on network TV. That and the absence of a state sales tax brings in plenty of visitors. "People drive here from New York and Connecticut," Barber points out, "leave their money, but don't put their kids in our schools. Everything else flows from those three factors."
Plenty of states can boast proximity to growth, a good business climate, and a healthy degree of tourism. New Hampshire's peculiar success has been to mix the three ingredients together and come up with a diversified economy. The state's 22.3% rise in employment is second best on the '86 list. So diversified has that employment growth been that in the period from 1981 to 1984, New Hampshire ranked in the top five nationally in four distinct job-growth categories: manufacturing (5.7%), nonmanufacturing (14.1%), trade (17.7%), and service (18.6%). Nor does the state depend on a few large meployers. In New Hampshire, companies with fewer than 100 workers account for 54% of all employment and 95% of all business establishments.
The Sandwich Research Group Inc., a firm providing market-research and strategic-planning services for several New Hampshire-based companies, is located in tiny Center Sandwich, N. H. Founder and chairman Jourdan Houston likes to say that she and her company are "right on the trailing edge." By "the trailing edge," Houston explains, she not only means that her state follows Boston's lead, but that it offers a wide-open market to small service firms like hers, which face little competition from larger, more entrenched firms statewide.
"A lot of us started right in the middle of the last recession and are still around," says Houston. "I'm not sure that would be true in the real world. Then agan, I'm not sure that this isn't the real world, after all."
Real enough -- and getting smaller all the time. For Doug Treat, being on the trailing edge means sitting in the driver's seat. When he moved Yankee Concepts to Center Ossipee a year ago, forsaking a much tonier location in Manchester's spanking new Technology Center, Treat's main concern was how to save cash in a heavily debt-financed business (after moving, Yankee Concepts's square-footage costs dropped from $12 to $3). Now, says Treat, his dream is to help build an alternative-model industrial park in Center Ossipee, one that comprises small technology companies like his that can play in national markets without having to sit in the mainstream.
"Give me a telephone line and a Federal Express drop," he smiles, "and the rest of the country is mine."
